I’d like to advance a hypothesis. Maybe, just maybe, business isn’t why companies exist anymore. Maybe 21st century companies are no longer just in business, but in “betterness.” Here’s what I mean.

A fool and his wallet, they say, are soon parted. Consider yours truly. Recently, I ordered furniture from IKEA. It’s just for a spare room, I thought, and I’ll save a few bucks. What I forgot? The hidden costs. Comically torturous self-assembly with hilariously absurd diagrams, to begin with. But I never even got that far.

First step: Being barked at by “customer service” reps. Delivery times were computer-programmed — so take it, buster, or leave it. Second step: dealing with DHL’s total ineptitude. Third step? Poof: no furniture. Amazingly, the driver just didn’t show up. Apparently, he drove around the block, and just left. But he’d try again next week, I was reassured. Thanks, guys!

And that got me thinking. IKEA never delivered my furniture. But you know what? Most companies never deliver what really counts: making people, communities, and society tangibly better off.

IKEA’s problem is that it has a business model — but no betterness model. By that I mean, not a model to merely make, market, and sell more meaningless, mass-produced junk, but a model for creating authentic economic value that accrues meaningfully to society. So here’s how to test your betterness model. What are the top three things you’re delivering? IKEA’s are: “1. Low prices 2. Self assembly 3. Awful service.”

The problem is that economically speaking, 2 and 3 are just costs that counterbalance 1. IKEA’s low prices are simply offset by passing the buck right back to customers (with that free hex wrench!), and little authentic value is created. And that’s the problem, in a nutshell. Buck-passing, cost-hiding, customer-squeezing: all are what business models are built to do. (Here, i’m using the standard, textbook, b-school definition of business models. i applaud efforts like Alex Osterwalder‘s, to take business models in a more constructive direction.)

Two decades ago, Ikea was hailed as a business model innovator, lionized in b-schools around the world. Let’s get real. Giving people worse furniture, service, and distribution…cheaper? There’s no economic there there.

Let’s look at another example: Tata’s revolutionary Nano. What are the three key things the Nano delivers? The first is a low cost car — and unlike at IKEA, the cost is truly low, since you don’t have to, uh, assemble it yourself. But the second is even more congestion on already crowded roads. The third, unfortunately, is even more carbon into the atmosphere.

One more example: Twitter. What does Twitter deliver? First, alerts. Second, connections. Third, ads that suck a little less than usual.

The most common answers to this test? First: shareholder value. Second: raw products. Third: jobs. No dice: betterness asks how you’re making better stuff, creating better jobs, or better value — value that makes people and society, not just shareholders, better off.

See how hard it is? Tata’s one of the world’s most innovative companies. Monsanto’s a textbook b-school success story. Though both score better than IKEA, neither has come close to mastering a betterness model. Twitter’s doing better, but “ads that suck less” are just a teeny, tiny bit better than, well, regular ads. Twitter’s one of the world’s most revolutionary companies, but even it’s not quite in betterness yet. Betterness models are deceptively tough to create, because most companies have only ever conceived of themselves as being in business.

Betterness, in contrast, means: 21st century companies exist to make people, communities, and society as better off as possible. They’re not just here to make money, but to make meaningful money.

Awesome furniture (with killer service and distribution) for less? Low-cost cars, leased by the minute or hour, Zipcar-style, with clean power, to boot? Inexpensive herbicide that raises crop yields, but limits overuse, to prevent resistance? Ubiquitous information, that builds social connections, without noisy interruptions always clamoring to hard-sell you stuff? Now that’s real economic value.

Dilbert, meet Dr House. A betterness model is a scalpel. It cuts through the jargon and obfuscation so beloved by businesses. Stripping away the fat, a betterness model reveals the sinews and tendons of value creation, the strength and solidity of a company’s economic heartbeat.

Let’s put all that in context.

“Business,” as we traditionally think of it, is a concept built for the industrial era. In the 21st century, business is a rusting, creaking, relic that’s past its sell-by date. It is ethically, intellectually, socially — and economically — bankrupt.

The business of business — enriching tuned-out shareholders, empowering suspiciously similar old dudes, overproducing more toxic junk, exploiting nature, robbing the future, leveraging it all to the hilt, and then asking for bailouts — well, more and more, all that’s the last thing that people, communities, and society want, need, and support.

Because business is bankrupt, tomorrow’s revolutionaries are intentionally going out of business — and going into betterness instead.

A great business model is a necessary — but not a sufficient — condition for competitive success in the 21st century. Betterness models are where the future of advantage begins.

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